GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXXVIII.

Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass Continues.

 

“I think. I cogitate,

Clots of blood,

Sick and baked,

Crawl out of my skull…”

V. Mayakovsky.

 

Ivanushka’s first “dream” is offered to the reader by Bulgakov right after the “foreigner’s” (that is Woland’s) telling of the first chapter of Pontius Pilate:

“How did it happen that I didn’t even notice that he managed to braid a whole story?” thought Bezdomny in amazement. “This is evening already! But maybe it wasn’t he who told it, maybe I just fell asleep, and all of it was my dream?” The poet ran his hand over his face like a man just awakening from sleep, and he saw that it was evening over Patriarch Ponds.

Because this “dream” had a witness, namely, Berlioz,---

(“But one has to admit that it was the professor who told the story, or otherwise we will have to admit that a very similar dream also visited Berlioz, because this is what Berlioz said:

“Your story is interesting, Professor, even though it does not coincide with the Gospel stories.”)

---who also heard the “professor’s” tale, this was not a dream, but what it merely shows is how greatly the “virginal” Ivanushka was overwhelmed by the story. As master would later tell him, he, Ivanushka, had the proper ground for insanity.

Ivanushka definitely possessed an extraordinarily vivid imagination, and the “foreigner’s” story evoked in his brain pictures of what he heard, like moving pictures in a film. Bulgakov obviously wanted the reader to be able to imagine those times and events taking place in Yerushalaim of that era.

A comparison with Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel is in order here. What Ivanushka imagines on a grand scale in Pontius Pilate, of Master and Margarita, is seen by the main character of the Theatrical Novel S. L. Maksudov on the far smaller scale of a notebook’s page:

“These people were born in dreams, they came out of dreams and settled in my hermit’s cell in a most determined way… At first, I was merely conversing with them… And then it started seeming to me in the evening hours that out of a white page something colorful was emerging… a picture. And, moreover, that picture was not flat, but three-dimensional… Like a box… and moving inside that box were the very same figurines as the characters described in my novel. Oh, what an engrossing game that was, and how many times did I feel sorry that the cat was no longer in this world, and there was nobody there to show to, how on a page in a tiny room people were moving, I am sure that the animal would have stretched out her paw and started scratching the page. I imagine the curiosity that would be burning in the cat’s eye, how her paw would be scratching the letters!”

And so, after his encounter with the “foreigner” Ivanushka is committed to a psychiatric hospital with the diagnosis: schizophrenia, due to his “...delirious interpretations, dysfunctional imagination, and probably hallucinations.”

Bulgakov’s insurance is demonstrable here!

The second “dream,” in chronological sequence, The Execution (that is, the chapter devoted to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ), was mentioned earlier, therefore we are now getting to Ivanushka’s third “dream.” A few days later, he sees these so-called “moving pictures” yet again.

“Before the arrival of the investigator, Ivanushka lay dreaming, and certain visions were passing before him. Thus, he saw a city, strange, unintelligible, non-existent... In his semi-dreaming state, a man sitting motionless in an armchair appeared before Ivan...”

Here Bulgakov describes Pontius Pilate, with his hatred for the “non-existent” city.

“And Ivan also saw the treeless yellow hill with the now vacant poles with crossbars.”

So, this is what interested Ivanushka now, and, by the same token as Pontius Pilate regretted that there had been something left unsaid with Yeshua, Ivan now regrets that he did not question the foreigner about what happened next in his story. Ivan’s dreaminess is his remembrance and a reconstruction of the pictures, in his brain, evoked by the vivid tale told by the “foreigner.”

We are now moving on to Ivanushka’s fourth dream at the psychiatric hospital, when he dreams of master, dying at that very time next door in room #118, visiting him for a second and last time with the “stranger” to bid him the final farewell. Earlier, I wrote that in this last conversation with master, “Ivanushka smiled, and with mad eyes looked somewhere past master.” Here is our first red flag. What kind of reaction does Ivanushka have to master coming to him to say his farewell, and that he is “flying away forever”? Ivanushka is not in the least surprised:

“I knew it. I figured it out…”

But how could Ivanushka have figured that one out, unless this was exactly what he had devised in his mind already, inventing the story of master and Margarita. (More about this in the still unposted chapter master…)

After master and Margarita had left, “Ivanushka fell into anxiety. He sat up in his bed, looked back alarmed and even groaned; then he started talking to himself, and got up from the bed. The thunderstorm was raging with an even greater intensity, and apparently troubled his soul.”

It is quite clear that Ivanushka had earlier dozed off, and dreamt the whole master’s visit. Otherwise, why would he have stayed in bed throughout their entire visit, and sat up and got off the bed only after they had been gone for some time? And also, Ivanushka “looked back alarmed,” having seen master and Margarita leave through the balcony door? Because of the thunderstorm and the noise behind the wall, in room #118, Ivanushka woke up and half-sleeping continued talking to himself, and, nervous and startled, he called the nurse Praskovia Fedorovna. Because of the storm, she wants to call the doctor to administer an injection to the patient, as the regular medication was administered to him at suppertime. It was probably that “regular” medication that made him sleep and hallucinate.

When Praskovia Fedorovna, in reply to Ivanushka’s persistent questioning, admits to him that his neighbor in room #118 had just “passed away,” he is not surprised.---

“I knew it! I can assure you that right now, in the city, one more person has died…”

The only person who can prove that Margarita exists is the demented Ivanushka who heard about the woman-stranger from master, and then saw her in his dream…---

“…I even know who---” at this point Ivanushka mysteriously smiled,--- “…she is a woman.”

There is one more “witness,” of course, but…

When Master and Margarita are leaving the apartment #50, the only witness to this is Annushka-the-Plague, an avid gossipmonger. How much credence we can give to her evidence is for you to judge. Read this:

“…Somebody rolled down the stairs and, crashing into Annushka, threw her aside, so that she knocked the back of her head against the wall…”

This is how rumors are spread and disseminated among the public, thanks to people like Annushka and the likes of her. No wonder the truth seldom reaches the public…

I’d also like to draw your attention to the curious fact that neither master telling Ivanushka about the woman he loves, nor Ivanushka himself, not even once call this woman, “Margarita,” by her name…

Thus of Ivanushka’s four presumable “dreams,” only one is a genuine dream, when master comes to his hospital room the second time to say farewell to Ivanushka. There is a fifth dream, of course, with which the novel ends. It is also a genuine dream, as Ivanushka is also a participant in it, together with master and Margarita. In a sense, this is a continuation of the fourth dream, where the latter receives its closure. This is why it makes better sense not to regard it as a separate dream.

A dream, for Bulgakov, is merely a literary device, when he wishes to mask reality, be that due to censorship, or in order to confuse the reader, make him or her think, or to indicate that things aren’t what they seem to be.

(Even in this last, “real” dream, Bulgakov uses the dream to show what really happened to master and Margarita. Without taking this last dream into account, we would be faced with a number of unexplainable discrepancies. [The reader may read more about this in the subchapter The Transformation of Master and Margarita in the chapter The Fantastic Novel of Master and Margarita (posted segments XXXI-XXXIII).])

(…As a matter of fact, Bulgakov uses this device of “dreams” to its full capacity in his famous play Beg/Run, where all acts/scenes of the play are being called “dreams,” and there are eight of them in all. More about Bulgakov’s Beg in my Beg.)

To be continued tomorrow.